Four weeks in, and the Rim Fire is the third largest wildfire in modern California state history. It has consumed nearly 400 square miles, or a quarter of a million acres of meadows, timber, and other pristine habitat through parts of Yosemite National Forest and beyond.The scope of something that massive and unforgiving can be difficult to wrap your head around, even if forest fires are the new normal. This visualization by Berlin's OpenDataCity charts how the fire, started by a hunter (not a pot farmer), has spread over the past few weeks, an epic bleed across the Sierra Nevada. What really drives home this sort of disaster is how the feature allows you to overlay other cities for comparison. Here's Manhattan:
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